Uploaded two pdf files containing the praise of the Buddha’s deeds. The documents contain the Tibetan version (in Tibetan script) together with the English translations. The english translations are copied from http://www.lotsawahouse.org

Accesstoinsight (ati) has a huge collection of buddhists texts translated to English. Apart from the suttas, it is also a huge repository of teachings by many buddhist teachers. Besides the normal online browsing of the site, ati also has a feature where one can download the entire site and then access the pages on our PCs or Laptops or other devices without internet connection. The site downdoad feature is here.

For more convenience, the offline version can be viewed using devices like iphone or ipad or other ebook readers as explained here. I have a Nokia E63 mobile phone and have been looking for ways to put a copy of ati’s offline version on it. I was finally able to do that using the steps mentioned below:

Download the offline version of ati. Unzip the file. After unzipping you will get a folder named “ati_website”, inside which is another folder named “html” and a file “start.html”

Copy the “ati_website” folder into the SD card of your phone. I copied it in “E:/Web/” (Symbian devices like the e63 refer to the SD card as “E:”)

Now the actual software which we will be using to the browse the files. Download and install Opera Mobile from the opera site. (Install opera mobile, not opera mini. Opera mobile is a native symbian application while opera mini is java application. I could not get opera mini to read html files from the SD card)

Start Opera mobile. In the Address bar enter “file://localhost/E:/Web/ati_website/start.html” (without the quotes. also the path that you enter will depend on where you copied the ati_website folder on your phone). Once the path till the start.html file is typed in the address bar, press enter. If everything goes right, the front page of the ati offline site will appear. From there, you can click on the links to access all the other pages. Go to Menu -> Bookmarks and bookmark the start page, so that you dont have to enter the path into the address bar every time. To have more reading space on the relatively small screen of e63, I enabled full screen reading from the settings. Also the font size in the opera mobile is way smaller for my eyes at 100% zoom. I found that a zoom of 160% is good.

Below are some screenshots:

ATI front page on e63

Another ATI page on E63

The above method worked for me. I hope it will work on any other phone which can run the opera mobile browser (opera mobile runs on most symbian s60 devices).

To have “check-as-you-type” feature (the red curvy lines indicating wrong spelling), go to Tools=>Options=>Language Settings=>Writing Aids and in the options, check the option “Check Spelling As You Type”

In order to see which kernel drivers are required to run these devices, one can paste the output of “lspci -n” into http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/ . I did this and found out that the intel wireless device is “Centrino Advanced-N 6200″ which requires the iwlagn driver which is there in kernel 2.6.30- . The ethernet card is “80E8059 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller” which requires the sky2 driver which is present in kernel 2.6.33- . I installed Debian lenny which comes with kernel 2.6.26. For the intel wireless card, one can follow the instructions at http://wiki.debian.org/iwlagn . Its bit of a work in order to make the marvell ethernet card work since kernel 2.6.33 or above is not in lenny-backports or not even in sid. But we have 2.6.35-rc6 in debian experimental. In order to install it, add “deb ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free” into /etc/sources.list and then do a “aptitude install linux-image-2.6.35-rc6-686″ which installs the 2.6.35 kernel. This worked for me. Some sony vaio laptops come with atheros wireless chipsets. You can have a look at http://wiki.debian.org/ath9k to see how to configure it.

Thanks for people on irc for their help. and thanks also to the dpkg bot on #debian. (we can ask the bot with : “/msg dpkg which driver” for example) :-)

I recently bought a Nokia E63 which runs Symbian Series 60 Version 3. To add more functionality I searched for Free and Open Source softwares to run on it. Following is a list softwares I found on the internet. The list will be updated as and when I find new stuffs.

Recently, I had to create a Lenny chroot in my laptop running Squeeze. I also had to access, from the chroot environment, files which are outside the chroot directory. I asked around on IRC and received respose ranging from “Why do you need to access files outside your chroot” to “Try creating hard links”. After much asking and googling, the following method solved my problem:

Using sshfsSSHFS (Secure SHell FileSystem) is a file system for Linux (and other operating systems with a FUSE implementation, such as Mac OS X or FreeBSD) capable of operating on files on a remote computer using just a secure shell login on the remote computer. On the local computer where the SSHFS is mounted, the implementation makes use of the FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) kernel module. The practical effect of this is that the end user can seamlessly interact with remote files being securely served over SSH just as if they were local files on his/her computer. On the remote computer the SFTP subsystem of SSH is used. — From man sshfs

The trick is to use sshfs to mount the required directory on your local machine onto a directory inside the chroot directory. Say, if u have your chroot directory at /srv/lenny-chroot and you have to access /home/user/stuffs from within chroot, you can simply do
sshfs localhost:/home/user/stuffs/ /srv/lenny-chroot/stuffs/This will mount the required directory under /srv/lenny-chroot/stuffs . You must already have the /srv/lenny-chroot/stuffs directory created beforehand.

Now when you do a chroot/srv/lenny-chroot , your /home/user/stuffs directory and its contents will be accessible from /stuffs directory in the chroot environment. Once you are done with working inside the chroot and you exit it, you can unmount the stuffs directory by doingfusermount -u /srv/lenny-chroot/stuffs